Support Women Artists Sunday: Nina Storey

Nina Storey

Nina Storey uses the phrase “21st-century soul” to describe her music, “because it’s rooted in a soul sound with bluesy overtones,” she explained to AfterEllen.com. “The music that I write is a mix of singer-songwriter acoustic stuff, and then there’s rock, and then there’s quirky stuff that’s totally out of the box.”

A Boulder, Colo., native now living in Los Angeles, Storey has been singing pretty much her whole life — professionally since the age of 12. She is self-taught, but grew up in a very musical family: Her mother is a songwriter and producer (and also acts as her manager and publicist), and her dad is a sound engineer. Her parents always encouraged her to pursue her craft.

Storey said she hasn’t talked about her sexual orientation in interviews before this one. “I’ve always kept a very private personal life my entire musical career,” she said. “I’ve always been kind of protective of that. Mostly it’s just because I’m a pretty shy person, and it feels kind of vulnerable to me. But I think it’s really important to be a whole person. In my daily life, I’ve always been out and that’s never been an issue.”

The subject matter of Storey’s songs runs the gamut from relationships to politics and social commentary. “I definitely have some music that’s more pointed and more out, and then some stuff that’s more general,” she said. “Personally I’ve lived a life where I’ve had relationships with men and women and celebrated both of those things equally, and my music has always reflected that.”

But Storey and the persona of a particular song aren’t necessarily one and the same. “That’s the beautiful safety that you have writing,” she said. “It may or may not be about me. It may be thinly veiled or completely fictitious. I would like the listener to have the opportunity to interpret it however they want.”

Storey described some of her songs as gender-bending, such as “Better Man,” where she sings in the first person of the people who have inspired her to be a better man. She also has a song about someone transitioning. “I toy with the concept of identity,” Storey said.

“If you’re writing music from a passionate place, the listener is hopefully going to identify with that,” she said, regardless of their gender or sexual orientation.